Ten things over-fifty job seekers needn’t worry about

The first time I was pregnant, I got deluged with advice. I was having twins, so my pregnant state was obvious from about the fourth month on. By the time I was six months pregnant, I couldn’t go grocery shopping or get my nails done without helpful strangers ladling out the tips.

Some of the advice was tremendous (trust your gut, sleep when the babies sleep, don’t stress about the laundry). Some of it was horrendous. God bless my husband’s grandma, who was alive at that time. She told me not to let the cat in the babies’ cribs, because the cat might steal the baby’s breath (I guess that would hurt the baby). I looked at the cat, and I looked at the baby, and I couldn’t figure out how the cat could possibly get a liplock on the baby (much less why I’d never heard of a case of a baby-breath-stealing cat doing anyone any harm). Nowadays, over-fifty job seekers are in the same boat I was in back in 1993. They are overwhelmed with well-meaning advice, but a lot of the advice plain stinks.

“Dress like you’re younger!” is a big piece of conventional wisdom for fifty-plus job seekers. “Talk about youthful topics, like Lady Gaga” is another. Spare me! We’ve earned our years. (I hit 53 in December.) We have nothing to apologize for. Here are ten things I hope fifty-and-up job-seekers will stop stressing about in 2013. We have bigger fish to fry!

Ten things over-fifty job seekers needn’t worry about

For starters, we needn’t worry about using old-people words like “needn’t.” We could use more civility in this world, and a little more decorum. The same goes for written thank-you notes and other social niceties. Thank goodness there are still people around who know how to do those things. If a hiring manager raised in a barn has the temerity to say (sadly, I’ve heard reports of it) “You didn’t have to send me that thank-you note, and it won’t help your case” feel free to say “Thank you so much for letting me know that. I didn’t send it to help my case, but because the person I am couldn’t possibly not send a thank-you note.”

We don’t need to worry about looking or acting younger. Maturity is a good thing. If people are uncomfortable about working with (or supervising) a colleague who’s older than they are, more exposure can only be a positive thing. Our job at work is to bring ourselves to the mix, not to fit in and disappear!

We don’t have to fret about the latest technology, unless that’s the focus of the job. There is a tendency today for people to attach their professional credibility to their ability to work with tools and gadgets, and I find it sad. For the average working person in a non-tech role, none of the technical stuff is very complicated, so don’t listen to anyone who tells you it is (or tells you that your lack of some stupid certification is an insurmountable barrier to employment). That’s ridiculous. I’m writing this blog post on WordPress, a platform that takes about eight seconds to learn if you’ve ever used a keyboard. Anyone who tells you “Oh, you don’t know Twitter and Facebook? That’s a HUGE problem” is a terrified weenie, the kind of person who makes him- or herself feel better by making other people feel worse. Wish that person well, and move on.

We don’t need to stress about our super-fit status. If you are healthy enough to work, don’t feel you have to mention that you run in every road race in town. I was a corporate HR person for two decades, and the vast majority of modifiable health claims (not to mention some of the biggest-ticket health problems) came from our wonderful weekend warriors, the dudes who hit the slopes or the rugby pitch on the weekends to prove that their full-time desk jockey status hadn’t softened them. Go on the job interview and talk about the issues the employer is dealing with, not your health. You have nothing to prove to anyone.

We don’t need to explain at excruciating levels of detail why we left the full-time workforce, if we did. We left to take care of other parts of our lives, and now — luckily for the organizations we’re speaking with – we are back!

We don’t have to worry about our wrinkles. There are plenty of twenty-something job-seekers for employers to choose from. If they invite you in for an interview knowing that your resume describes way more experience than any twenty- or thirty-year-old could have amassed, they know what they’re getting.

There’s no need to know the latest fads, pop stars, movies, slogans or memes. (You can look up that last term if you haven’t heard it before.) Shoot me, please, if I ever start believing my worldview is best informed by people I gave birth to, or other people their age.

We don’t need to dumb down our resumes in order not to scare people. We don’t have to downgrade our past job titles or leave advanced degrees out of the picture. If you’ve got a LinkedIn profile, presumably that stuff (the real stuff) is all there, anyway. As long as we don’t make our lofty stature the point of the interview, but rather focus the conversation on the organization and its needs, we are in great shape. If someone is intimidated by your 1975 Princeton diploma, do you really want to work for him anyway?

We don’t need to freak out because we were laid off from a previous job. It’s 2013. It’s hard to find people who haven’t been laid off at least once, if not several times. Don’t apologize for the layoff; most of the time, reductions in force have zip-all to do with performance.

Lastly, don’t worry that you’re a dinosaur, that the working world has somehow left you behind. Most of what I rail and preach about is the departure from values and standards at work that went without saying in earlier generations: things like respecting people, valuing employees’ lives outside of work, and making the workplace human instead of robotic and transactional. Mature employees can bring in those values that employers desperately need.

Remember: if they don’t get you, they don’t deserve you. Over-fifty (and over-sixty and over-seventy) job seekers got their wisdom the hard way, by earning it every day. Don’t ever apologize for those years, that so many of our loved ones didn’t get to enjoy with us. We are here. We are amazing. You have to feel your mojo first, before anyone else will see it!

Great article. Good points about certain aspects of mature people can, and should, bring to the workforce, ie., “respecting people, valuing employees’ lives outside of work, and making
the workplace human instead of robotic and transactional”. I often hear the complaint that there are no leaders anymore, unfortunately, if one is a 30 something and bucking to develop, yet disrespectful of those who have come before, then it is going to be difficult to pause and recognize what to value by those who’ve figured it out.

I thoroughly enjoyed your article in the Sunday Post titled “Hey, job seekers: Look at 50+ in age as a plus”. You mention mojo being the life force in that article as well. I am a consummate professional (just the facts – all business type) and sometimes forget that my interpersonal skills are the gift that I bring to the workplace – not only technical skills on a resume.

I like everything you said (especially the bit about technology not being rocket science that literally any moron could learn). I mean, when people exclude you because of some particular software you may not have used. Like, when your resume clearly shows you have adapted and learned literally hundreds of applications since before most of your competition was born, really irritates the crap outta me. In every job I ever had, I was told I was better than my predecessor and I did not have to get trained for months either. I had to teach myself because I already knew more than the dolts that I worked with.
Anyway, I agree with your sentiments. But if you think anyone else in power believes as you do, you are dead wrong.

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